2012/11/25 dimitris chloupis <[email protected]>: > 240 commits later we had a morphic > interface for blender written in python and ported to bgl so it could run > from inside the blender window.
I'm trying to understand... was it an alternative interface for Blender, or an interface toolkit just happening to sit on top of Blender? (or both?) > Suprisingly we did not have so much problem > with out own bugs but bgl proven too slow , buggy and unreliable so I had to > abandon because I could only solve that problem with hacking blender source > which is written in C and is almost not commented at all. Lets say here I am > no big fan of C language of Blender source. I begin to understand what you meant with "only thing it worries me is the type of technical blocks / obstacles I may come across". > Here you can find if you are interested the final blender python code ---> > https://github.com/kilon/EphestosOld What really would interest me is your personal opinion on Smalltalk as somebody coming from a Python background. That is, once you have more experience with it (Smalltalk). I don't know much Python, but considered it more than once because of something I didn't find in other mainstream languages that I would miss from Smalltalk: named parameters. Of course in Smalltalk you don't have that, since the method signatures give you that for free ;-) > From there on I was just searching for a home for Ephestos. I has quite > reluctant to join pharo because of the lack of developers and because I am > not that familiar with smalltalk as much I am with python. To be frank I am > not that motivated to join a language that is has a very small community > because of bug fixes and library support. I understand you completely and it is good to read this loud and clear. For every person like you that communicates this in a clear way there must be hundreds that consider Smalltalk and then discard it for the same (or other) reasons; the input never reaching the community. I would be tempted to tell you that being such a small community also has its advantages ;-) but I don't want to trivialize the issue. Smalltalk's community *is* very small, and the library support... well... could (and hopefully will) be better. In some areas, let's be honest, we are years behind other platforms/environments/languages. But why does a Smalltalk community still exists at all, then? Because yet in many other areas, Smalltalk is still *ahead* of anything else out there also for years if not for decades. Yes, I think this is a vital issue, and kind of a chicken-egg problem that needs to be solved (I know, it *is* being solved). In fact, I think I will write another mail asking this "small" (?) community what they think about it. > I actually even looked into common > lisp and emacs very recently as well since I really like lisp as a language > and I prefer from smalltalk. Conceptually I find Lisp also very interesting. But anytime I evaluate going the Lisp route I find myself planning to reach first some Lisp-based-Smalltalk syntax & semantics and then I say: why waste my time if there *is* already Smalltalk, waiting to be used? :-) At the end, I think the right approach to DSL (domain-specific-languages) nirvana will be the idea presented by the Helvetia project, incidentally also Smalltalk-based: http://scg.unibe.ch/research/helvetia > But it has become obvious to me that what I am trying to do for Ephestos is > synonymous to what smalltalk is trying to do, to offer a live visual > environment that makes code , fun , flexible and efficient. Cool :-) > So I decided to > take the deep dive into pharo. Smalltalk may not be super popular as python Not for a long shot, unfortunately. We as the Smalltalk community should be very sincere and evaluate, with a cool head, why this is so. > but porting all smalltalk stuff or even just little to python is just insane > amount of work so I think I made the sensible choice to port my project to > Pharo because it was already based on pharo libraries anyway. I don't get it... which part will you port from Python to Smalltalk, and which part you don't need/want to port? > Saying that I am still interested in offering some Blender support for > Ephestos and thus making pharo able to quickly communicate with blender And Blender would... render 3d? (whilst the interface would be on the Pharo side?) > probably via a socket bridge. The idea of (socket) "brides" to other languages / runtimes always made sense to me. At least short-term to break the library/devs cycle. I don't know if this idea was evaluated by the community. Recently there was an announcement of a bridge to a XUL (Mozilla) -based frontend, with Smalltalk back-end, using Seaside's continuations. So it should be easier as ever. > I got all these crazy ideas but I am willing > to take them a step at a time , so that is why I talked about "decades". I very much liked what Stef wrote yesterday, it got me thinking: start small and work steadily... Good to see that you have such long-term plans! :-) Best regards, Sebastian
